Libro de los Plagios - Formas de apoyarse en obra ajena

The "Libro de los Plagios" (Book of Plagiarism) is a booklet that has been printed for distribution during an exhibition of a series of large charcoal drawings, and which mimics the style and content of a book originally published by the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza in 1991, which has gone out of print.

The original is an indictment of what the author perceived as a flagrant plagiarism of his work. Illustrated with black and white photos of abstract sculptures, Oteiza juxtaposes the work of other artists with his own in order to demonstrate similarities, or to denounce their shortcomings. The images include a wide range of works that came to represent Contemporary Basque Sculpture, but mainly dwell on those of Eduardo Chillida, the artist's biggest rival at the time. This is accompanied by a treatise on different ways to lean on other people's work, that is part polemic, part poetry, and vindicates the author as the inventor of a certain kind of abstraction in sculpture.

The booklet contains an updated version of this text, in which the words of the artist have been manipulated and supplemented with a contemporary reflection on the topic of appropriation, and in which the photos have been substituted by charcoal renderings of the same images.